Good grief. Philip Norman strikes again. His career as a Beatle biographer for non-Beatles fans, summarized:

Shout!: "John Lennon was two thirds of the Beatles" is the most infamous claim and the one he had to walk back on most, but while the book is fluently written (that was never Norman's problem), it's the kind of biography where we're told what exactly Brian Epstein felt when seeing John Lennon for the first time (not, you understand, based on Brian Epstein's own comments), and where the Paul bashing is only matched by the George ignoring-or-sneering. (Poor Ringo doesn't even rate a bashing.) And you can tell Norman has not much interest in the musical production side of things, which is, after all, what makes the Beatles important to begin with. It's positive about Yoko which at the time was still relatively rare, but otherwise, I'm struggling to find good things to say. The 2001 reedition preface includes more sneering at George and bashing of Paul, including the claim the only reason why people felt sorry when Linda McCartney died was that the British public had gotten into the habit of mourning blondes with Diana, I kid you not.

...and when George died, he wrote an incredibly mean spirited obituary. This is a plot point.

John Lennon: The Life: Note the "The" Life. Norman didn't make a secret out of the fact he considers all other Lennon biographers inferior to himself. That said, this particular biography included some genuine new material - Aunt Mimi's fling with her student subletter, and famously the passage where either Yoko or Norman-as-narrator (it's phrased a bit ambigiously) says John told her something that made he wonder whether he didn't have certain feelings for Paul. Also, and perhaps not unrelatedly to the fact that while he still refused to meet him, Paul did answer some of Norman's emails, Mr. Norman has changed his mind about the importance of Paul McCartney to the Beatles. Behold, now he's a worthy co-creator! Otoh, Norman still isn't really interested in the creative musical process, and ignores anything not fitting with his idea of John.

Norman's Paul biography: I haven't read it. The novelty of of Norman no longer being anti Paul has already been spent with the Lennon bio, so I was and am not very motivated. Also, I'm still resentful over that tasteless Linda remark.

And now he has written a George biography. And a lengthy article about writing the George biography, in wihch he's absolutely bewildered as to why Olivia Harrison, son Dhani and the fans would hold such a little thing as the absolutely mean spirited George obituary against him. Quoth Norman: I’d hoped that my sympathetic treatment of George in the Lennon, McCartney and Clapton books might persuade Olivia Harrison and their son, Dhani, to co-operate in it. However, the sample of my work drawn to her attention – by a previously friendly executive at the Beatles’ Apple company – was that ill-judged 2001 obituary, given seeming eternal life on the internet along with numerous posts from fans virtually endowing me with horns and a tail. Now there clearly was no possibility of access to Olivia or Dhani.

Firstly, what sympathetic treatment of George in the Lennon book? Secondly, gee, Philip N., why would a woman who has had to watch her husband die of cancer, then opens up a national newspaper and reads you calling said husband "a miserable git", not to mention a couple of other equally mean-spirited things, want to talk to you? Especially since the motivation for you writing a biography of her husband clearly isn't because you cared for his music, thoughts and person during his life time, but because writing abouto the Beatles is still your best paying gig. (Also: Olivia once saved George from a knife attack by attacking the attacker. Maybe Norman is lucky she won't receive him, is what I'm saying. Olivia is hardcore.)

Going from an older fandom to a newer one: this cracked me up to no end. And makes me wonder whether someone will ever be insane enough to write that fusion. (Don't look at me.) And you know, given that Frederick the Great wrote in his obituary (!) of Voltaire, of himself in the third person, "the King wished to possess this genius of such rarity and uniqueness", which is an Annie Wilkes thing to say if ever there was one, the comparison does have its merits. *veg*

Briefly, a few aborted attempts at consumating new canon:

1.) Latest version of Persuasion at Netflix: too ghastly to endure for longer than ten minutes, and that was ghastly enough. Not even fun in a "so bad it's amusing" kind of way.

2.) Mr. Mercedes, tv version of a Stephen King novel I haven't read yet, because Castle Rock put me in a Stephen King mood: starts fine, but then it's revealed the villain is a a dark haired nerdish loner/serial killer living with his mother in an incesteous relatinship with, and look, if I want Norman Bates, I'll watch Psycho or Bates Motel. End of attempt to watch Mr. Mercedes.

3) The Raven Boys by Maggie Stiefvater: no, sorry, I don't care about any of you.

On the bright side, mildred_of_midgard unearthed some more 18th century diaries and letters for me to enjoy last week, and also I just rewatched the Black Sails pilot for the first time in years and saw I still love my pirate show a lot. ( Spoilers for the Black Sails pilot ensue )

Belatedly, the music meme One is supposed to use titles that come to mind spontanously. Here we go:

A Place: Sommer in der Stadt: aka the hilarious hymn to Munich by the Spider Murphy Gang. Non-German speakers, the pictures match the lyrics; alternatively, the other Spider Murphy song about (some parts of) Munich that immediately came to my mind was Schickeria. Look, I live in this city. Of course I thought of it.

A Food: Aber bitte mit Sahne (Udo Jürgens) (Udo Jürgens and his songs were ever present on the radio when I grew up)

A Drink: Bei einem Tee a deux (duet from Franz Lehar's Im Land des Lächelns, Siegfried Jerusalem and Helen Donath singing- this is my Aged Parent's favourite operetta)

Animal: Blackbird (you knew there would be a Beatles song sooner or later)

A Number: In the year 2525: Zager and Evans, to images from Metropolis in this particular version.

Color: The Pink Panther Theme Song (thank you, Henry Mancini)

Boy's Name: Sindbad: sue me, it was the intro song to one of my favourite cartoon series when I was a child. Runner up: Falco's Amadeus, probably due to my rewatch last year.

Girl's Name: Mrs. Robinson (Simon and Garfunkle, live version); again, I blame my Dad, who used to wear his soundtrack record from The Graduate out and worshiped the ground Simon and Garfunkle tread on for a while.

Alternatively: Maria (from West Side Story here sung by Aaron Tveit. Before I love that musical and never fail to listen whenever this sing is played.

Profession: Paperback Writer; would have been this anyway, but the recent Stephen King vid just settled it.

A Vehicle: Meine Oma fährt im Hühnerstall Motorrad ("My grandma drives a scooter in the chicken stable", was a popular nonsense song since the 1920s, was covered early this year with somewhat altered lyrics that caused a big scandal, hence fresh in my mind);

alternatively: Über den Wolken: Reinhard Mey's hymn to air planes. It's been a good while since I sat in an air plane, not just due to Covid, but this song is what I always heared in my memory when I did.


...and speaking of Stephen King, have a rec: Dark Stripes is a fantastic fanfiction based on The Talisman, in which it's a grown up Richard's turn to confront the past and save Jack. Just beautiful and intense, and full of excellent hurt/comfort to boot.

Re: British politics... so, I hear the sequel to Into the Spidervers will be titled Spiderwoman: Judgment Day?

Truly, it was a glorious day yesterday, but today the depressing guess has grown in me that the horror clowns on both sides of the Atlantic will just brazen it out. In the US, the Right have become so fanatic and radicalized that they seem incapable of mustering anything like the sense of responsibility that sent Nixon running in the end, and in Britain, Brexit has become an ideology to trump, no pun intended, all other ideologies to its followers, whose policy, if it can be called that, basically amounts to "we had to destroy the village in order to save it". I mean, yes, they've utterly unmasked themselves. (Sovereignity of parliament? Not if its members do anything we don't like. Sovereignity of British courts and British laws? Nah, judges are "enemies of the people" (Stalin says hello). United Kingdom? To hell with North Ireland, Scotland, and Wales.) But I doubt anyone brainwashed by Brexit fever will care. You know what, I prefer Stephen King novels. Sure, a great many of the cast may die, and if you're really unlucky, the glimpse of the afterlife makes things even worse, but generally people make more sense, and fanatics get foiled before it's all over.

On that note, I've only begun to check out this delightful Stephen King fanfiction exchange: Some Find Solace is a creepy h/c delight of a story in which Trisha (from The Girl who loved Tom Gordon), Carrie (White, of course, from guess which novel), Jesse (from Gerald's Game) and Dolores Clairborne (another titular heroine) all meet.

My own assignment for startrekholidays has arrived. There aren't prompts as such, but there are several relationships I think I can work with. After a rewatch of key episodes. Oh, the hardship! :)

Discworld:

The BBC is currently broadcasting a radio version of Night Watch, available on iplayer for us non-British folks, and I'm listening, enthralled, to the first episode.

Blake's 7:

If you're a B7 fan, chances are you've already read this, but if you have not: a great new essay, on B7, Blake, Gareth Thomas and Chris Boucher. It's passionate and highly enjoyable to read. (Minus a few unneccessary swipes at non-B7 topics such as John Crichton, Clara Oswald and David Tennant's performance as Richard II. But it would be a boring internet life if we agreed on everything with the people we agree on some things. :)

Stephen King:

Handy and amusing flowchart showing how all the novels and characters are connected.

MCU

The Lingering Reminders: hands down one of the best, most even handed post-Civil War stories, in which Tony Stark runs across one of Peggy Carter's old mates. No, not that one. The author's take on old Jack Thompson feels extremely plausible, and there's a hilarious inside gag if you're familiar with the Spider-man mythology. (If you're not, you'll still be amused.) Great mixture of humor and angst all around.

Shakespeare:

Sons of York: Great take on Shakespeare's version of the York family, specifically the two Richards, father and son.

Perhaps the oddest thing about this book is this: you can read and enjoy it on its own. And yet it's impossible to talk about without referencing another book and a film, so I shan't even try.

As you may or may not be aware, this newest Stephen King novel is a sequel to one of his earliest bestsellers (in fact his first hardcover publication - the earlier novels, like his debut Carrie, having been paperback originals), The Shining, which still is thought as one of King's best novels. Which was then later turned into a movie by Stanley Kubrick, and became one of Kubrick's most famous works. Stephen King never made a secret of loathing the film. (This is worth mentioning because there is in fact no shortage of crappy or mediocre films based on works by Stephen King; the good ones are in the minority, and King himself hasn't been vocal about many of them but is more or less neutral about most. But not about The Shining.) He hated the casting - Jack Nicholson as Jack Torrance especially, since, as he put it, one look at Nicholson and you know he's going to go crazy, whereas book!Jack Torrance has a fighting chance not to, but he also thought the way Kubrick directed Shelley Duvall made a caricature ouf of Wendy; and he acknowledged but resented that Kubrick shifted the emphasis to a "domestic tragedy with only very vague supernatural overtones". There is a lot to say about The Shining, the book (and indeed The Shining, the film), and the very many ways you can interpret it; I refer you to two quite different "Rereading Stephen King" articles about The Shining, one in the Guardian, and one one at Tor. Both are written with decades of hindsight, both value the book as one of his best, but they emphasize quite different aspects and come to different conclusions.

The Guardian one does the compare and contrast to Kubrick's film: But the most glaring shift, one that colours the book entirely, is tonal. In the book, King goes to great pains to stress that Jack Torrance is a good man. He was a teacher, and he developed a problem with drink just as his father had. When he accidentally breaks Danny's arm, Jack realises he has to change his ways. He's scared of the past and who he could become. He wants to make amends, and the hotel offers security and time with his family. King wants us to feel empathy for Jack. Everybody screws up, he wants us to say; everybody deserves a second chance.

In the movie, however, Jack Torrance is Jack Nicholson. He's crazy from the start, the man you saw in Easy Rider and One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest. He's got that manic grin and unkempt hair, and you don't trust him. He has a swagger and a temper, and there's a constant feeling that Wendy (Shelley Duvall) – so much more timid and subservient in the film than the novel, reduced to little more than a long face and a shrill voice – hasn't left him because she's just too weak. In the novel, she wants her husband back.

The Tor article, by contrast, goes full throat for the autobiographical subtext: Few books cut as close to the bone as The Shining: an alcoholic schoolteacher with a family to support writes his way to financial security, then turns around and writes a book about an alcoholic schoolteacher with a family to support who fails to make good on his talent and tries to murder his family. “I was the guy who had written The Shining without even realizing that I was writing about myself,” he says in On Writing. King has talked before about the rage he felt in his years of struggle, commenting that there were times when he felt real anger towards his children. It all comes pouring out in Jack Torrance, a bad dad who breaks his son’s arm while drunk (a condition King was later to admit he was in most of the time). All those years of guilt, of fearing that he couldn’t support his family, of feeling like they were a millstone around his neck, he finally shakes it off thanks to his success, and then he puts on a fiction suit and dives right back in again. He even gives Torrance his own bad habits, like chewing aspirin when hung over. (...) Jack Torrance is every writer’s nightmare. Just gifted enough to get himself into trouble, he’s sold some stories to big outlets but has never been able to live up to his own promise. Instead, he pisses away his money on booze, gets sober after almost killing a kid while drunk driving, then he loses his temper and punches one of his students, gets fired from his teaching job, and is rescued from poverty by his last remaining friend who gets him a job as the caretaker of The Overlook Hotel out in Colorado. It’s a Bizarro World version of King, who did make good on his promise, but who wasn’t sober, and moved his family out to Colorado at their richest, not their poorest. (...) Jack Torrance is King’s deepest fears given life: an alcoholic hack writer who’s one binge away from destroying his family. But the difference between King and Torrance is clear in Chapter 32, the point at which Jack finally drives past the last mile-marker in the land of the sane. It’s the chapter in which he re-reads the play he’s been working on all season and realizes that he hates his characters, he despises them, he wants to make them suffer. If the reader had any doubts that Jack’s gone insane, King seems to be saying, here’s the clearest indication possible. To King, losing sympathy for his characters is the sign of a rotten imagination. It’s King’s biggest taboo, and one he never violates: no matter how bad his characters get, he always finds a way to like them. Even Jack Torrance.

This act of finding sympathy, even for the devil, might be King’s way of reassuring himself that he’s no Jack Torrance. For all of his own self-destructive impulses, for all the hate he sometimes felt towards his family, for all the povery, and suffering, and doubt, he never stopped loving the characters he wrote about, even the bad ones. And, in The Shining, he wrote about the worst one he could possible imagine: himself.


Now, analyzing a still living writer psychologically feels a bit disturbingly voyeuristic, but in this particular case it's hard not to. And I think both rereaders are correct, actually. Book!Jack embodies the road not taken, all things gone wrong as a writer and a man that could go wrong; at the same time, book!Jack is also not a monster and potentially redeemable. Even at the very last, when he's insane and completetly taken over by The Overlook, and hunting his family down, there is still a core in him that fights against that; the book gives him a moment of grace, when he's tracked his son down, a moment when the old Jack fights back to the surface to stop himself, telling Danny that he loves him and to run. In one of the interviews promoting Doctor Sleep, King names as one of the things that made him write the current book despite being very ware that sequels almost inevitably feel like let downs the question as to what would have happened to Jack Torrance if there had been an AA group around for him to join. (This is not a question you could ask about the Jack in Kubrick's film.) And the need to believe that you're redeemable, even at your lowest, is a key element to what drives Doctor Sleep.

( Spoilers for Doctor Sleep from this point onwards )

In continuing news about awesome veteran actors giving interviews: Martin Landau, looking back at his long life from Hitchcock to Burton. (Tim, not Richard.) (Also apparantly the interviewer isn't a Buffy the Vampire Slayer fan, because daughter Juliet does not get mentioned.) Very enjoyable to read, especially things like Landau refuting the "doomed to die early and burn out" cliché about James Dean and Marilyn Monroe. Choice quote:

"No, no, no," he says with uncharacteristic emphasis. "Jimmy never talked about dying; Jimmy talked about living. Jimmy's only concern was that he would become an old boy, like Mickey Rooney. When Kazan tested actors for East of Eden, Paul Newman and Jimmy auditioned on the same day. Paul looked like a man when he was 20, whereas Jimmy was still playing high-school kids at 23. So that bothered him a bit. But Jimmy did not want to die.

Vaguely connected via Mr. Landau, who played the man himself in what is still my favourite Tim Burton film bar none, Ed Wood, and got an Oscar for it: a photo of Bela Lugosi at eighteen. Did I mention how thrilled I was to discover that bust of him at the mash up castle in Budapest?

****

Being a child in the 70s, growing up in the 80s: as it happens, Stephen King's first novel, Carrie, actually was the first King novel I ever read (i.e. I didn't come to King via his later more famous efforts). It introduced me to the concept of high-school-as-hell two decades before Buffy, and I find a lot of a lot of the observations in this article about rereading the novel decades later (with the awareness of what King archetypes and tropes first show up here, how he would develop etc., hold true for me as well. I'd add that I didn't like the Brian de Palma film as much as the article writer did; in fact I felt let down by it when I saw it, not least because the shift to making Miss Desjardins (called Gardner in the film because apparantly de Palma hadn't twigged that having many Maine characters French surnames had a point for Stephen King) a more prominent character (almost a second and positive mother figure for Carrie) and making Sue Snell a less important one (in the film, you have no idea whether or not she actually wants to help Carrie or is part of the conspiracy against her, and are inclined to believe the later, whereas in the novel for a great part we're in her pov) seemed to me a betrayal of something that had been important to me in the novel. Sue is someone wo does something crappy at the start of the novel, realises she did, and tries to atone for it in a meaningful way, which even if it doesn't work it the way she wants changes her, and for the better. Given what happens to Carrie herself in the novel, this was an important second narrative. And Carrie not having an adult figure she could trust and who actively cared for her is important, too; Miss Desjardins in the book punishing the bullies but not actually doing something constructive to help Carrie in her home situation contributes, in its own way, to the unfolding disaster. (Also I think Miss Desjardins embodies a lot of a young King's own ambiguity about himself as a high school teacher, which he still was at that point, in her anger at her students yet awareness she doesn't make their lives better, either.)

Anyway, Carrie: raw, clumsy, gripping. I read it before actually getting my first period, so one enduring effect was "thank God it happened at home for me and not in school!" Also, young me thought King made Carrie's abusive mother (his first but by no means last take at The Scarily Insane Christian Fanatic) up from scratch and that she was the most unrealistic character of the novel. Which judgment I, err, later was forced to revise. Sadly. And now I'm ponding about favourite and least favourite King novels again, and Misery is probably my favourite still, because of all the writing meta and the perverse twist on the writer and muse concept, followed by Dolores Clairborne. But Carrie is its own category for me: neither a favourite nor a least favourite: a first. In so many ways.

Being with the Aged Parents always makes for a busy life. Which means links for you instead of ramblings:


Why Stephen King is awesome. Read the comments as well. It's not that I like every King book, but I like a lot of them, for many of the reasons given here.


Iron Man:

Aaaaand one of my favourite writers from other fandoms has been inspired by the movie. His Girl Friday. Or Saturday. Maybe Sunday. is a delightful take by hackthis on Pepper's job-hunting until she ends up with Tony Stark as a boss.

Battlestar Galactica:

We realized we had tricked mortality: short, terse and fantastic, a great take on Laura Roslin and the Six model nicknamed Natalie in the most recent episode, Guess what's coming to Dinner.

Wish no more: this one picks up another moment and character constellation from that episode and takes on Gaius Baltar and Felix Gaeta.